


but we just haven't mastered the fall

by haveloved



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 15:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30040971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haveloved/pseuds/haveloved
Summary: But the nightmare had rattled him more than he’d thought. That’s the only explanation for why his hands are shaking enough that he sloshes some of the bourbon onto the countertop rather than into the glass. When he gropes to his side for a dish rag he overbalances and pitches too far forward--maybe his legs are unsteady, too--and knocks the glass straight off the counter.“Fuck’s sake, Bones!” is grumbled barely a moment later, unsurprisingly.
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy
Comments: 10
Kudos: 42
Collections: Leonard McCoy Bingo





	but we just haven't mastered the fall

**Author's Note:**

> **content warnings:** Aftermath of a trauma-related nightmare and brief mentions of a shuttle accident that led to casualties. A brief reference to suicide. Jim is heavily implied to be a survivor of child abuse as per 2009 canon.
> 
> First of all, thank you so very much to everyone who read and commented/kudosed my first story for the ship, _absolution_. I so appreciate everyone's enthusiasm and I love knowing I'm not just tossing fic into the void!
> 
> I signed up for Tumblr's Leonard McCoy Bingo, and this is... what you get when someone like me who is not technically or medically inclined is trying to work with the prompt "shuttle accident." This is also technically pre-slash but it didn't feel right calling it platonic, as such, so forgive my slightly indefinite tagging.
> 
> Title credit to [Ingrid Michaelson's "My Darling"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXWWHUy_HOo).

Leonard McCoy’s hands do not shake.

The thought that they would is nigh inconceivable. A surgeon needs steady hands, moreso, if things pan out, a surgeon on a damned starship that’s going to be buffeted six ways from Sunday on a regular basis. But long before he’d been a surgeon he’d been tending to horses in his daddy’s barn and Lord knew you had to hold still as a stone not to spook a skittish creature whose trust you were trying to earn. (Hell, he remembers thinking not long after they’d met, that wasn’t unlike how he’d dealt with Jim, early on.)

But the nightmare had rattled him more than he’d thought. That’s the only explanation for why his hands are shaking enough that he sloshes some of the bourbon onto the countertop rather than into the glass. When he gropes to his side for a dish rag he overbalances and pitches too far forward--maybe his legs are unsteady, too--and knocks the glass straight off the counter.

“Fuck’s sake, Bones!” is grumbled barely a moment later, unsurprisingly. He’d feel bad about waking the kid on any other day; hungover Jim may be, he deserves the one or two nights he gets to relax with how much he’s been killing himself lately. Alternating shifts--a few as a barback, a few unloading trucks--is going to wreck his body if he keeps it up, but Leonard tries to remind himself it’s only for the summer and that he doesn’t need to henpeck Jim. Not too much, anyway. At least on the nights Jim crashes on his couch he can surreptitiously check him over for signs of strain.

In the darkness he sees Jim heave himself up off the couch and haltingly over to the kitchen. He’s squinting against even the half-light and when he catches sight of Leonard’s face--and that he hasn’t moved to clean up the broken glass or even grab another one--something shifts. The irritation leaves his expression, chased away by something softer.

With the dustpan and brush retrieved Jim shoos him away from the broken glass and gets down on his knees. Leonard’s thoughts keep slipping away from anything that isn’t the fragments of the nightmare but they seize on the way the gold chain of Jim’s necklace is glinting even in the dim light. (He’d asked Jim once during a physical why he wears a Star of David; he’s never seen the kid observe much of anything. Jim had murmured something about sentimental value and looked away, and Leonard had regretted asking, reminded himself Jim never had asked the same of David’s ring on his own finger.)

He focuses on that until Jim is done cleaning and on his feet again. They stand there in silence a few moments before Jim boosts himself up onto the counter to sit, swinging his legs. He should move, Leonard tells his body, and slowly he does, though only as much to rest his back against the counter and slump exhaustedly, his gaze on the floor now.

He isn’t sure how many minutes pass in dead quiet, only that the one of them to break it is Jim. “And you tell _me_ I don’t talk sometimes. Hell.”

“Didn’t mean to wake you.” Leonard scuffs a bare foot absently along tile. “Don’t mean to keep you up, either.”

“Figure whatever’s got you so out of it that your good bourbon’s varnishing the countertop instead of in a glass somewhere is worth talking about. Even if it is three in the goddamn morning.”

Leonard is still more often than not, but Jim fidgets like a restless son of a bitch. It’s almost balletic now the way he stretches his legs out in front of him, nearly enough to touch the kitchen island with the tips of his toes. It sinks in slower than it could that whenever he watches Jim--the glint of light off the chain, every twitch and flinch of his body as he resists settling into calm--his thoughts stop orbiting the darkness at the fringes of his consciousness and start orbiting Jim instead.

He reaches for the still-open bottle of bourbon and takes a swig directly from it. When he sets it back down Jim does the same, heedless of the unsanitariness that the always-on-alert portion of Leonard’s brain winces at. For the first time since he’d seen the broken glass Jim shifts his gaze back to him, a glint of concern cutting the intensity of the blue he knows from a picture in a Starfleet textbook Jim got from his daddy.

“2236. Shuttle went down in one of our fields.”

“ _Our_ , meaning...” Jim mouths something, doing the math--Leonard was nine--then “... your family’s fields? On the farm?”

Leonard nods. “There was an investigation into the cause, but we never found out anything beyond what they put on the news. Made Pa angry to no end, since if it hadn’t been for him they wouldn’t even have had the one survivor they did end up with. Passengers died on impact, but he made sure the pilot survived. ‘Least ‘til a few months later when he downed thirtyodd pills with a glass of scotch.”

Jim has looked away again, to the wall straight ahead of him. Leonard hung a picture there not long after he’d moved in--Jim has the necklace to be sentimental about; Leonard has his father’s ring and a scattering of pictures from home. He’s noticed Jim looking at this one before, the way his eyes trace the details of the house whose outside it shows. He doesn’t think Jim sees it the way he does--the shutters that could have used repainting, the bushes some trimming. He thinks maybe Jim just sees it as a home.

“Makes sense, then. Why you don’t like shuttles.”

Leonard nods.

“You dream about it a lot?”

“Barely. Compared to how I used to.”

“When you were a kid?” 

Leonard nods again. “Pa saved all the articles about it he could find. Got my hands on ‘em one day. Made it worse, in the end. Having names to put to the bodies. Just meant I knew who exactly was lumberin’ after me in the nightmares.”

 _Nightmares_ makes something flicker across Jim’s face, too quickly for him to fully read what, exactly. He hasn’t gotten a handle just yet on what nightmares mean, for Jim. He’s sure he’s had some, even though for Jim they seem like silent, creeping things he doesn’t wake from. They seem like something Leonard wouldn’t notice if it wasn’t that some nights--those nights a bit like tonight when Jim sprawls asleep on his couch and he’s up late, filling out paperwork or thinking back over a casualty--he finds himself watching as Jim kicks or flinches in his sleep, his face tight with worry or fear even in slumber. The third time he’d seen it, he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d plunked himself down on the arm of the couch and carded his fingers through Jim’s mussed hair until his quickened breathing eased. Every time he’s done it since--he’s tried not to let there be many; the thought that if Jim wakes and finds him comforting him he might resist makes a pit in his stomach he tries not to think much about--he’s told himself not to do it again.

“‘m sorry, Bones,” Jim murmurs, quieter than he’s heard from him in quite a while. Jim is lively, boisterous when drunk or happy, and in the barely a year they’ve known each other Leonard’s only seen him otherwise a handful of nights. One had been his birthday; one, a night Jim may have been alluding to earlier, the first time he can remember letting something slip about how getting him to talk felt like the tooth extraction he’d once done on David’s prized stallion. Jim’d gone through four beers in as many hours. He’d been mournful, finger tracing a nasty looking burn scar on his inner arm Leonard didn’t end up having the heart to ask about. He’d learned to let Jim alone on nights like that, though maybe _alone_ wasn’t the right word for the way he’d let himself stay rooted by his side, the way Jim’d ended up asleep draped halfway across his lap.

“Was a long time ago, kid,” he says, with a halfhearted wave of his hand, though he kicks himself as he does it because he knows he owes the kid a _thanks_. Maybe that’s why he steps a bit closer and lets the same hand he’d waved settle on Jim’s shoulder and, a moment later, squeeze. Jim’s eyes trail to his hand and then up to his face, and then he nods, once.

When they leave the kitchen he watches Jim return to the couch, start to pick up the blanket and settle back in. He’s used to thinking over everything far more than he needs to--every course of action with a patient, every question he dares to ask Jim about anything before the day they’d met, every last fight with Jocelyn. He manages to shut down his whirring, stuttering goddamn brain just enough to say, without stopping himself midway through, “Couch is gonna wreck your back, you know. If those damn boxes you’re slinging three nights a week don’t do it first.”

“I’m all right, Bones.” Jim’s smile is feeble--Jim can tell he’s trying to shift the concern away from himself. “Couch is a hell of a lot better than that marble slab they call a mattress back in campus housing.”

“And _this_ mattress is a hell of a lot better than that couch.” Leonard nods to the whole other side of the bed empty beside him. “If we’re both gonna be sleeping in on our day off you may as well be doing it somewhere you won’t get a charley horse you’ll be bitching at me to work out.”

He can tell Jim wants to protest--God forbid he ever ask for anything, ever hint that he needs anything other than the minimum possible accommodations, and if he ever meets that bastard Jim calls a stepfather he has about a dozen things he wants to say to him on the subject and one good punch he wants to throw--but there’s still that softness Leonard saw in his face when he caught sight of the broken glass. Jim knows what he’s asking without him having to actually ask it, and he’s never been more grateful for whatever the hell kind of unspoken thing has formed between them than he is right now.

Even with their standing in the chill of the kitchen for a while, Jim is still radiating warmth when he settles beside him, under the bedclothes. (Jim, he's learned, is the sort of heathen who scoffs at the idea of a flatsheet, but he seems to recognize Leonard's bed means Leonard's rules and if Leonard isn't wrong he shifts and draws the warm covers closer against him.) He hasn't slept in a bed with someone else since Joce. He isn't quite like Jim, who's charmed his way into enough beds of enough beings Leonard's surprised to be the one whose place he keeps returning to.

Jim's breathing is slow, steady, and he can tell when he looks over Jim is struggling to keep his eyes open. From the way he'd shuffled in earlier, good and drunk and not kicking off his shoes until Leonard had threatened grievous bodily harm if he put them on the couch, he knows he's exhausted. He probably would have slept through the night if Leonard hadn’t woken him. If Jim sleeps in later than he does he’ll make him breakfast or… something.

“Lights off.”

Lying in the dark gives him an excuse not to look at Jim, not to see the concern he’s sure is still in his gaze or whatever else he fears he’ll find. Embarrassment, maybe, at Leonard’s vulnerability. Whatever part of him knows Jim isn’t that way--isn’t, at his core, that swaggering masculine energy he likes to throw off to the people who don’t really _know_ him--is being argued with by the part of him that doubts, constantly, himself most of all.

He’s so consumed with _not_ looking at Jim that he forgets he can still _feel_ him there, forgets until he realizes a hand has slipped into his. Jim’s thumb is stroking over the back of his hand. Jim is pulling his hand closer and into him until their clasped hands are resting on Jim’s hip, and the knowledge they’ll probably still be there come morning settles deep into Leonard, brings him a kind of calm.

“‘Night, Bones,” Jim whispers, maybe the first whisper he’s ever heard from Jim. There’s a tenderness to it that jolts him, as tired as he is, and it’s an effort to stop his thoughts from seizing on it like vultures with carrion to pick it apart. There’s always the morning. And there’s always, he knows by now, Jim.

As he hears Jim’s breathing ease into the rhythm of sleep he shifts closer, onto his side. He’s close enough that he could press a kiss to Jim’s temple, but he stops himself. He whispers, “‘Night, kid.” and surrenders himself to the warmth of Jim’s body, Jim’s hand in his, and sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to everyone who's read either this or _absolution!_ Feel free to find me over on [Tumblr](http://markcampbells.tumblr.com/) as well.


End file.
